


this I will destroy (for your sake)

by handschuhmaus



Category: Doctor Who (1963)
Genre: Body Horror, Bugs & Insects, Fictional drugs, Gen, Hopeful Ending, Intrigue, Plant based body horror, Platonic Cuddling, Psychological Horror, Rebellion, Suicidal Thoughts, Tea, Torture, Worldbuilding, although the bugs do go in the body horror plants, bodily misuse of prisoners, cattus ex machina, eventual hurt/comfort, heavy on the hurt at the beginning, ok to podfic, slow and torturous death penalty, they aren't part of the body horror unless you count some of them stinging and
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-02
Updated: 2020-05-08
Packaged: 2021-03-02 05:53:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 7,256
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23966446
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/handschuhmaus/pseuds/handschuhmaus
Summary: Not fifteen minutes on a new planet, Ace is arrested, imprisoned and tortured. Informed the Professor is either gone or is meeting the same fate, she makes plans for a final strike at the torturers.The Doctor is only told she has been committed to the same dreadful fate as the rest of the prisoners. He wants to get revenge, calculated but hot.Little do they know, theywillmeet again, and might be able to turn the tide on this planet away from the bleak present towards a more just future.
Relationships: Seventh Doctor & Ace McShane, slight Ace McShane/OFC
Comments: 6
Kudos: 12
Collections: Id Pro Quo 2020





	1. the blind man

**Author's Note:**

  * For [JustMcShane](https://archiveofourown.org/users/JustMcShane/gifts).



> This is rated mature purely because it's heavy on body horror.
> 
> Also, apologies if I haven't done a great job on characterization; it's been _a while_ since I watched Seven (whom I've never seen all of, nor have I really written for them before) and I kept going "ah, this'll be an opportunity and motivation to marathon it!" and... and then current events turned all our lives off kilter and kind of sapped my motivation, both for writing and watching shows.

Ace never intended to get separated from the Professor. For goodness sake, they had been close enough they could've touched hands if only both of them reached out. But the people in the uniforms--the military police force or whatever they were (she still didn't know, what had to be about two days later)--had come up silently behind her in the bazaar and clamped a hand coated in some sort of spice-smelling grease over her mouth, and frog-marched her out of the marketplace, and all her struggling to get free did no good. 

The Professor had been just too absorbed in his conversation inside the crowded stand, not quite two meters away, a teetering pile of assorted electronic equipment on either side, to notice her capture.

She could _almost_ tell what direction they'd gone, if it hadn't been for a few too many turns and a twice walked roundabout where they'd also made her spin nine times. Not that it would do any good. She had no way to communicate with the Doctor, and they hadn't been on planet before her snatching long enough to know anyone else. 

And there had been only three people around in these dungeons besides her. There was someone around the corner she couldn't actually see from her cell, and someone in the adjacent cell who had waved from the shadows but not said anything, seeing as the third person was a guard. The guards rotated, certainly, but they gave no indication that they even heard her. Perhaps they were indoctrinated to provide no aid or comfort to the prisoners, not even the water she had desperately wanted for some hours, or a cloth of some sort to staunch her busted lip.

Or maybe there was something deeper going on and the translation circuits weren't working any longer after two days. The little being called the Minister of Alignment (Ace was pretty sure he was some sort of political police) had certainly hinted that she was under extreme suspicion as a foreigner and lucky to not simply be destroyed. The TARDIS wouldn't be easy to destroy, she thought, but someone could have broken it. She had already known by then she was under some kind of suspicion, thanks to their treatment. But she needed a little more information before it would be reasonable to make an escape attempt and blow this foul place sky-high. Hopefully they wouldn't kill her first.

She wasn't sure when another session would come. These people believed, strongly, in torture. In tattered jumpsuits with integrated masks, the same pink color as a carnation the Professor had been given last planet by a small family, they'd busted up her lip and then given her a methodical all-over battering, apparently designed to cause maximum pain while minimizing lasting damage. Unless of course these people had very different tolerance to being bruised up. But even though the bruises would heal, Ace was not eager to get more of them. 

Worse was what happened after she had no answers for the Minister of Alignment. "Tell me about the plans of the Sagicheks!" had been thundered over and over. She had been almost delirious at that point, and mostly remembered thinking that it was an astonishing voice for the Minister's physical form, reminding her as it did of a chimpanzee. But she'd screamed "I don't know anything, you gotta believe me, I just got here!" in numerous variations until her throat was hoarse, and it didn't satisfy them. It was apparently unbelievable that she had had no idea who or what the Sagicheks even were. Lying to satisfy them had seemed impracticable given her sheer lack of knowledge about the planet.

And then the case of syringes had come out, the needles thick and the contents viscous, and this new torturer, a deceptively calm woman in a neat mustard yellow lab coat, had been graphic about what each did. "This is a powerful acid that dissolves your bones and teeth, from the inside out." "This will speed up your heart and make you believe you're going to die." (these seemed to be two separate functions, because though her heart beat fast like she'd dashed a few hundred meters, that was not scary and certainly not enough to cause the all-consuming feeling of impending doom) "This solidifies inside you," said before poking the needle into her knee and possibly into the joint, Ace couldn't see. 

Finally, in a bleak and bleary dawn, "Do you know what a teratoma is? A tumor, growing teeth and growing hair, inside you, uncontrollably," and then a last needle into her right arm just beyond her armpit, which was ticklish and sensitive anyway. It was a shivery and unsettling sensation, and the notion of hair (and teeth) growing _inside_ her arm was just about nauseating, still.

It was strange that, directly after that, they'd expected her to eat. But being unsure when she'd get more food, she had choked down one of the dense, bland flatbreads, and the first kindness since her capture had come. "Here, drink this water," a remarkably soft voice had said. "It's okay—I promise it's not poisoned." And she sipped from one side of the glass and smiled.

Ace knew it was more complicated than that; this woman might have been given a pre-emptive antidote. But she was being far nicer than anyone else had, and she was, well, cute, in a very practical sort of way. 

So Ace drank, and a part of the puzzle of this planet had come out. "No one suspects me of anything; you get away with a lot as part of the kitchen staff," Lotti said, and then far more, about how there was a rebellion that _cared_ about what happened to people, mostly. (And until she saw the man in the cell around the corner, and he related part of his tale this morning, she would have thought that was merely in contrast to the current regime that had imprisoned her.) About how the government was intolerable now and they were working to change it. Details not so different from many other situations on other planets. Lotti had not explained what the Sagicheks were, and Ace had not dared ask. 

That had only come later, when they paraded a man through the corridor in front of her dusty cell and Ace gasped at the sight of him. He wore only a sort of skirt assembled from what had to be stained and much-used dishtowels, but most of the rest of him was covered in leaves and moss and flowers. There were contorted bulges twining around his arm, almost like veins on a caricature of a body builder, but these were _roots_ , a magenta stem emerging from the adjacent skin and into a profligate mass of bluish-green leaves. His calves had lush patches of moss growing over strange concavities, but the worst was his eyes.

The sockets were empty, or rather, contained no eyes. What did emerge from the hollows were flowers, like wildly colored zinnias, a good four centimeters across. There were two on his left, which was odd enough, but the one from the right socket was peculiarly shaped, grown wrong and horizontally elongated like the occasional strange dandelions Ace had plucked from lawns as a child, years and parsecs away. It gave an effect almost like a sheep's eye, but as a flower, and some distance out of the eye socket. An irrational part of her wondered if he could still see out of them. But then—she hadn't slept, not since she's got here, not really. Some sort of drug, probably. That had been, oh, what she was calling this morning, a good 36 hours after the bazaar.

Time had seemed to slow to a crawl as he passed the three meters that her jail bars spanned. Then she observed something else: bean vines twined in his hair, making a strange semi-woven curtain of it. There was a pod hanging to the near side of his head (though it looked more like a sort of giant peapod than a string bean) as if someone, drawing blind or cluelessly, had affixed an absurdly large earring in the wrong spot. And as she watched, the pod fell to the floor in front of her cell, and a great purple winged insect, resembling both wasp and dragonfly and nearly the size of her hand, emerged from it, wings slowly unfolding, leaving behind one whole "pea" and the remnants of what looked to be three to four others in the pod.

The guards (and this prisoner) seemed to take no notice of the incident. Something had made Ace collect the plant debris, which was only about the length of her hand beyond the very sturdy metal bars. The pod, though, felt terrible to the touch for all it wasn't completely different from a string bean, and seemed to make her hand numb, so she kept only the "pea". It did not look like an Earth pea, being slightly elongated, about the size of a marble, and patterned in concentric stripes around the little dent that most beans had. She stuck it in her skirt pocket. They'd taken her jacket and bag almost first thing.

About ten minutes later, the guards (even the normal one) having left, a voice came from around the corner. "Aren't you a stranger to this planet?" it said, with a strange cadence.

"Why should I talk to you?" Ace had answered, trying to keep a blithe tone. 

"Because I can tell you how you end up like this, with flowers instead of eyes."


	2. burned ground

**Forty-seven hours ago:**

The Doctor wheeled around, midway through Zaxhi's description of a part that would probably help with the diagnostics on a part of the TARDIS which was functioning strangely. 

Ace wasn't there. 

The Time Lord's mind shifted gears in a second, and all the prior concerns about political instability and abuse of indenturement and deadly animals, which had hitherto been only background to the comparatively _amusing_ matter of an issue with the TARDIS, were in the front of his mind.

"Zaxhi--" he interrupted hir, "behind me, the girl in the black jacket?"

The wizened old man who sat crocheting, cocooned under blankets in a rocking chair behind Zaxhi's stack of graffitied oscilloscopes spoke up, his voice hoarse and faint. "They took her. The patrol."

"Why?!" the Doctor demanded, in high temper, though he tried not to sound angry at Zaxhi's (...friend? companion? it didn't much matter at the moment).

"Probably their buzz didn't like somethin' in her backpack," explained the old man.

"This is Çu, Doctor. Anbolv Çu, the Doctor," Zaxhi interjected.

The Doctor had definitely heard of people calling the police the "fuzz". He was not, however, familiar with nicknaming anything he expected in this context as "buzz". "What do you mean, 'buzz'?" he asked with a little more caution and curiosity.

"Funnily enough, we call them blackjackets most of the time," Zaxhi put in thoughtfully, rubbing hir ear. 

Çu was slightly more informative. "They have trained wasps. They detect unauthorized chemicals." 

That he hadn't heard about. The deadly animals of the old days (well. twenty years or so ago, when Zaxhi was of about Ace's maturity, and he'd come here, alone, while Adric was getting food) were sort of like small woolly mammoths, in a way. Or furry green human-sized vicious elephants, in temperament nothing like the intelligent giants of earth. And certainly not trained wasps.

He shook his head almost imperceptibly. Though the minimal out-of-date background he possessed _might_ prove helpful, pondering about elephants wasn't just now. "What will they do to her?" he asked.

Zaxhi gestured towards a towering structure looming on the horizon, seeping smoke at the top and surrounded by a strange brownish miasma. "They _recycle_ people now," ze said in a strained voice.

The Doctor went hot and then suddenly very, very cold. One moment of inattention and-- _it would be an incinerator_ \--Ace was in dire, dire danger.

"Where will they have taken her?" he asked. Perhaps his background with this place would be less useful than he had thought. Not that Ace couldn't, under almost any circumstances, take care of herself, but she didn't know what he did about the past here, let alone this potentially dire present, and they hadn't been out of the TARDIS ten minutes. 

Zaxhi and Çu exchanged a look. "We don't know," ze admitted. "They don't like the public knowing."

* * *

"How is that?" Ace had asked.

"By running afoul of those who usurped authority," said the man with the flowers for eyes. He sounded bitter, and there was a further half-laugh, half-groan from the cell on the other side of her. 

"Oh. She should see you, too," he said, and then she saw something moving from the corner of her eye, towards the other cell. She was able to lean out slightly between the bars and see someone else doing the same in the adjacent cell. It was hard to see but she could see something like grass sewing their mouth shut, and brightly colored shelf fungus (at least it looked like it) protruding from their face. 

"They're keeping you around a bit thinking you might have evidence of something. They're highly suspicious of outsiders," he said, and her neighbor in sight nodded fervently. "Do the least little thing wrong and you'll be sent down here."

"There aren't more of us?" she asked.

There was a bitter laugh. "Not many outsiders dare venture here, even those from the districts that aren't yet subject to the coup. If you do the least little thing wrong, they will throw the full brunt of their force against you." 

Her neighbor moaned plaintively, and he continued as if in response. "Even their own aren't immune. E'd tell you if e could still talk. E was a member of their group, and gave aid to a prisoner. They came down heavily."

It was frightening information but she had thought the explanation first offered was important, considering what they had already done to her. "What about you, and the flowers?"

"Oh, I was the Counselor for the Disabled, under the old regime. I was not proud of it; I thought I might do some good but I was blocked from doing it. I'll let on the old Council is rotten, and I should have to stand for my failures in letting them 'try' the protesters, but the Hangar Coup believes in fear. They aren't going to kill you yet, though. They let their flowers do that, or their fungus. Depending on just how you offend them, they'll use you for different things." 

Ace looked at the prisoner with the sewn up lips. Eir eyes were still present, but looked red and sad as best she could see. Certainly there was a story, but she wasn't the Professor to investigate it that much right now. "What do you mean by that?"

"The wasp you saw? We used to call those corpse lights. They hatch in the hair-beans, live in beehives and then pollinate the flowers they've placed in my eyes, giving a honey that destabilizes the mind sufficiently to allow them to interface with other beings or computers. Not, I should note, in quantity, and they're not going to use it on you, too rare for that. But it is important to them, so much so that they like to kill us very slowly, like animals for the slaughter, by letting us play host to the plants they like. I shall probably die soon, the flower roots growing into my braincage, and the tissue there."

The neighbor made some sort of gesture, out of eir cell bars.

"And the mushrooms are also a drug. They like to dangle the possibility of infection with a disease for which they are the only cure in front of the populace. But--yes--despite all their threats, they aren't doing much to you. A little sleeplessness, a little bad feeling, but not half the stuff they tell you it does. It'll just be a few days of trying to get you to talk, and then they'll put some sort of flowers on you."

"But I have a friend," Ace had said. "He'll be looking for me," she added, even though there was no evidence of the Professor doing so as yet.

"They'll tell him you're dead, if anyone asks after a prisoner. And they'll send him off world. If he goes to the Sarichek," and Ace didn't ask, because she didn't want to know, "he'll be turned into the Hangars, the ones that hold us. If he goes to the Aarcon Council, they'll 'try' him... the penalty for which is to be thrown to the Mai-key. They've been a form of so-called justice on our world for many centuries, but they are half-starved and they will attack anyone thrown to them ravenously. He is either gone, or dead," said the former Counselor for the Disabled, firmly.

And Ace believed it. After all, she had hardly been with the Professor for that long, and whatever his world-saving on the past few worlds, if she was in this dire of a situation...why would he come back for her? 

That had been when she decided to commit a suicide attack, if she could only figure out how to let the others free _and_ find her nitro...or something else of the like, it would be a way to wreck some havoc with the people who had tortured her. 

She hadn't been too concerned about her wellbeing, when she'd blown up the art classroom. She'd been the opposite of concerned sometimes, to the point of now and then actively wanting to die. It wasn't something she liked thinking about and there was a part of her that said it was jumping to an extreme length needlessly, and yet... the only people around her were also resigned to death. 

Yes, as soon as she could figure out breaking out, and whatever other information about the building she could figure, she would blow this place. And die that way, not by slow torture, having plants grown into her...

* * *

**Twenty-four hours ago:**

The Doctor had not slept, naturally. The thing was, this was proceeding all too slowly for his liking, because his instincts were screaming at him to rescue Ace, or at the very least destroy the people who had captured her. 

But he'd learned very quickly that the so-called "buzz" were certainly capable of detecting and indicating explosives of the same type as nitro-9 (taking out one major weapon in Ace's arsenal), that there was a standing policy of segregating foreign prisoners in such a way that he was practically guaranteed no information if he got himself captured, and that plans to infiltrate the place would not come easy. 

Oh, he was working on that, and he was fairly certain that at least two of the members of the local cell of the rebellion were plants from other factions, which made any plan tricky, but it was only now that he had finagled his way--via borrowing some kind soul's identity--into an office of some sort that supposedly had access to a registry of prisoner info.

The first thing he noticed, and immediately marked as a bad sign, was the pile of bones, about as tall and as wide at the base as the height of a smallish human (or Time Lord), like himself or _Ace_. Then the person working the very dim amber terminal looked over fancy cat's eye glasses at him, and asked "You gotta problem?"

"One of my friends was expecting a visitor," he said. "A small human, who was wearing a black jacket, called Ace McShane."

The worker depressed several keys, stared at the screen, hit several others, and then input something. He considered trying for flattery, but as they were not a member of the major humanoid species in this area with various cues in dress, and given that several different gender-marked honorifics of varying formality (not to mention pronouns) were in common use here anyway, there was no way of telling which might be appropriate. It was a situation he appreciated normally, but an unmarked one might have been of use just about now. In fact he'd like one himself, even though he was, in English, a "him." Silly thing to be thinking about on a rescue mission, but the computer was evidently slow.

Another word or two entered into the screen. "She's been recycled," he was informed, and a wrinkled hand gestured at the pile of bones. 

He wasn't certain if that was entirely literal... they didn't all look humanoid, and he wasn't sure if they looked as fresh as they ought to be (but probably they could do things with acid or something), but it was a galvanizing thing to hear anyway. He choked out a "Thank you for the information," and headed out, a refreshed determination in his step. 

"I will destroy this very world if that's what it takes to stop this system that arbitrarily killed you," the Doctor vowed quietly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the invented name Çu is intended to be said something like "tsu", but with a nasalized vowel, but it's also likely to be pronounced either a) like "Sue" but with nasal vowel or b) with the "ts" sound but without the nasalization. _what even IS alien orthography and a random invented word??_


	3. the third faction

**From the present time:**

Ace did not get to make a ploy for escape before being given any plants, however. Lotti came, with gloved hands and a sort of greenhouse tray, to weave the same vines into her hair. "If I don't take my turn, they will get suspicious," she explained, and patted Ace's hand. "But this one won't attack anything but your hair yet. They used to grow it in the back of hairdressers' shops, but they say it's too much hassle to go around collecting it now." There seemed to be little point in resisting at the moment, especially given every instinct she had said that worse vindication would be visited upon her for trying to thwart the allotted punishment.

"And the corpse lights?" Ace asked, the feeling of the other girl's hands in her hair making her shiver, for reasons partly due to her being cute and at least acting kind, and partly due to the fact that she was becoming host to a parasitic plant. 

"They mostly reserve those for members of the Aarcon Council, or their staff. I'm told it's a messy death, and they don't like having to deal with it except when absolutely necessary. Though they do need their Melisne."

"It's the drug. The one that allows them to go around invading the minds of other people, or augmenting theirs with computers," the hoarse voice of the man with flowers in his eyes came from around the corner. 

Lotti moved around her head and then came very close to her ear. "You want to escape?" she said in hushed tones.

Ace nodded, hard, and hoped it translated accurately to this place. "It won't be yet," Lotti admitted. "but I and my cousin are in the resistance, and we'll help you soon."

"Just get me the keys and get out," Ace hissed. "If I can get to my bag--or a reasonably well equipped lab, kitchen even probably, I can blow this place." 

"There are plans," Lotti admitted hesitantly. "but I don't know if it'll work out. You know, we had every faith in the Hangars. We thought they'd be far better than the Council, and some people still live under the Council. But they do almost everything the Council did--does and more, just to different people." Her hands still weaved the sapling through Ace's hair. It seemed like ponytails would be out of the question in the immediate future.

* * *

The crux of the matter was that he couldn't find any large scale vulnerability aside from the building itself, and well, an out-and-out battle or revolution, as these people were hoping for, was unlikely to succeed, or at best likely to be a Pyrrhic victory. 

So he'd arrived at a plot, not his best plotting, no, but it seemed workable: get a supply of the BOK gas that was normally used for cleaning and disinfecting weapons (check), release the acrid lacrimatory (yes, he was releasing tear gas, sort of. The local equivalent of an earth MSDS said it did no permanent harm) fumes into the building, then seize the fleeing authorities. But to avoid killing innocents and potential allies, should the gas settle into the dungeons, they were going to do a sweep of the dungeons, and so a young lell (a specifically nonbinary youth) named Dae was trying to sneak him in via the kitchens. ("no one cares who goes into the kitchens", e said.)

* * *

It was a strange thing to be doing, but, as Lotti (who didn't have immediate access to the keys and had been admitted by the guard) left, Ace found herself thanking, well, the universe, or whoever might have been smiling upon her for _cats_. One, which looked perfectly ordinary if large by earth standards until the green of its eyes wasn't quite right, more like creme de menthe pie than a cat's eyes, had somehow gotten into the prison hallway and leaped onto the guard's trousers. Perhaps their lunch had involved fish and they'd spilled it on themselves. 

In trying to get the cat's claws out of their thigh, the guard did not realize that the keys had slipped free of the clip with which they were attached to the official issue belt, and despite the noise simply walked off holding the cat by the scruff of its neck. 

Ace fished desperately for the keys and the clinking must have alerted her cellmates. She got herself out, and then her neighbor (yes, it was grass, which looked rough and oddly dark, stitching eir mouth closed.), before the ex-Counselor informed them, "They've probably put your effects in the room down across from me." 

"Go," she told her neighbor, the one who had been part of this ...given her source was honest, and whose name she didn't know.

Unfortunately there was no readily improvised weapon to be found in the two cells or the hallway, so she was going to have to run if she was spotted rather than have a hope of defense. Nevertheless she peered around the corner carefully, and saw the bright zinnias in the hollow face again, as well as a door to what couldn't be a very wide room and might just be the belongings storage. 

"I'll get my explosives and then you tell me anything you can about this building that might help, and I'll let you out," she offered...and then rapidly realized that he might be unable to navigate all by himself.

* * *

There was a cat in the hallway at the bottom of the stairs, and it seemed aggravated. The Doctor was reminded of his previous self. "We shouldn't leave it in the building. I don't know what BOK gas does to cats," he remarked quietly to his companion.

But as they both reached calmly down in an attempt to befriend it enough to carry it out, it startled and ran around the corner. 

"We need to go there anyway," said the Doctor, and was answered with a nod. "I don't want anyone else innocent to suffer that fate." 

When they caught up with it, the cat was rubbing itself against a door that was slightly ajar. "Push it open, but carefully," Dae instructed him. 

The last person the Doctor expected to see now was within. 

"Ace!" he cried, even though as soon as it was out of his mouth he realized it would probably startle her.

* * *

She was really wishing she hadn't left the baseball bat in the TARDIS, and no real weapon was easily to be found in the storage room either. Because she could hear someone entering the room. But then she heard her name in that voice she'd already become accustomed to and wheeled around.

"Professor?" it came out as a bit of a croak, probably down to not much water and nerves.

He wasn't wearing all his normal clothes, she thought with detachment, as he closed the steps between them and made to embrace her. With unreal relief she leaned into him for the moment, even with her bruises twinging, and wrapped her suddenly unsteady arms around him in reciprocation. 

"Ace!" he said, proudly and fondly, and kissed her forehead. 

They stood like that for a moment, and then she pulled back. "We've got to blow up this place, Professor. They're really bad."

"I--yes, I want to send them out to the wolves first. I have some tear gas, of sorts. I thought you were dead." He was clearly a little emotional, and Ace felt ashamed of having doubted his concern for her well-being. But he shook this off, and allowed "I agree. Anyone else down here?"

"Yeah. I have to let out the ex-Counselor for the Disabled. Says he's from the previous administration." She wasn't going to give into the tiredness that had hit her as soon as she relaxed a fraction at the Doctor's presence. She still needed to do--almost everything she had intended to when the adrenaline hit her at the escape from the cell. "I don't think we should let Lotti get killed. She was ...relatively nice."

An unfamiliar voice intruded. "I don't know how to pick locks, Doctor." A youth with short brown hair and a simple uniform something like Lotti's, in a drab blue-grey color, stepped into the doorway. 

"That's alright. I've got the keys," she spoke quickly, and rushed past him to the cell door. 

"Come on, Mittens, you've got to come out with us," the Professor said behind her, and once the Counselor was out of his cell, Ace turned to see the helpful, if mischievous cat in the Professor's arms. 

"This way," said the stranger, and gestured further down the hallway, where she suspected there was a stairway, if her bleary memories of her torture session were correct.

* * *

"You can leave here," The Doctor informed the other prisoner, when they'd gotten to the exterior door. 

"I'm not sure I should walk away," countered the man with flowers growing from his eye sockets. 

"Well, then at least leave the building. He says there's tear gas," Dae interjected.

Ace brightened, a little, at the sight of someone walking down the hallway. "Dae! Ace, that's my cousin!" the stranger informed them.

And his companion gestured to her in turn."This is Lotti, Professor. She was nice...enough." 

"I've thought I should do the right thing, but it's difficult to know when it's safe to do that," the newly-introduced Lotti admitted.

"There's about to be a release of tear gas," the Doctor directed, ushering them towards the door.

* * *

A more pressing problem, he thought, was _what the right thing actually was_. "They use living prisoners to cultivate plants, I guess. For their own use," Ace told him. 

"Ah, yes. I should have told you this planet has some nastiness. And it's only gotten worse," he admitted. 

"He said the Council wasn't much better? But Professor, do _you_ know what the Saracheks are? They kept asking me about them and so I didn't ask in there..." Ace looked... tired and beaten up and a little bit frightened if very determined to boldly do the right thing.

"That's our resistance," Lotti answered. "We're not so well organized, I guess, but they're afraid."

"When you rule by fear, sometimes you are more afraid you'll die by it," the Doctor coined this almost aphorism on the spot. 

"The Council was bad. Is bad. Dysfunctional. But the Hangars are even more violent, if that's possible. And the Saracheks, what little I know of them, are unprincipled and can't work out where the Hangar Coup went wrong," their ex-counselor recounted. Or was it ex-council member?

"Were you on the Council?" the Doctor asked distractedly, thinking of his imminent return to the local rebellion leaders, who had indeed assisted him.

"No, there's a difference in ruling and being appointed to a Counselor position, subordinate to the actual governing body. Which is where I was ineffectual. But they were already teetering on the cusp of terror." 

"And I've just injected more terror into this business," he mused uneasily.

There was a muffled hiss as a bit of gas leaked out of an imperfectly sealed window, and then the door a few meters away was thrown open and someone emerged, weeping in anguish and trying to wipe the gas out of his eyes. Another figure followed, this one wearing lab goggles but still coughing. Ace grimaced at that one. "He was part of the torture," she said.

"Doctor," said a woman who was one of the local Sarachek leaders, but she did not explain what she wanted from him. Perhaps because an elegant crawler vehicle with shiny silver paint had pulled up and three wizened people emerged from it, surveying the crowd.

"Is that you, Minn?" asked one of them, in a very high bred voice that only just betrayed her concern.

"Councilhead Yero," the man with flowers in his eyes responded. "I still don't regret what I did, but I regret falling into the hands of the Hangars." 

"I hadn't ever thought about just how numerous the potential opposition is," Yero said stiffly, and looked at the Saracheks, who were dressed more ordinarily. 

"You know, it was a blow to us to lose this justice center," one of her collegues remarked. 

The Sarachek leader interjected, "You can't just send people to the Mai-kiy" (ah yes. that was the name of those pachyderms) "every time they disagree with you!" 

Then the fellow Ace disliked, for torturing her, asked no one in particular, pointedly, "Are we just going to allow them to stand around here?" 

The other one, tears still streaming down his face, considered them. "They say you catch more blackjackets with pears than with lamp oil."

"Your tech is impressive, I'll grant," Yero said, still almost condescending. "But what I don't see is why you didn't notice the trouble _we_ were already having with the fear tactic." 

"It's going to be a bunch of talking, is it, Professor?" Ace asked, and now she definitely was succumbing to her ordeal. Hmmm. He had not altogether anticipated the standing around and talking thing.

"Yes, as a matter of fact it is," he pronounced authoritatively. "I am from another world, and if you cannot manage to carry on with a half-way civil discussion about how things will change around here for the better of the average citizen, gods so help me, I will make certain you do. But for the interim, I am going to get my companion some rest. Be thankful your world didn't kill her as I had thought, for you would have faced my wrath." Nevermind that planning for as much as they had accomplished had been plagued by difficulties mostly caused by his being only one person and unwilling to additionally risk Ace, despite thinking her dead. 

But she was blessedly alive, and now they were going to get back to the TARDIS. "It's alright," she said, a little dazed, "I'll last." 

"You thought I'd left you, didn't you?" he whispered into her ear, throwing an arm across her shoulders. "And even I need to get over the fact you're not dead. We need tea, and sleep."


	4. but you, you are dear to me

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and now it's time for the ( _nearly_ ) unadulterated comfort...

The TARDIS, incredibly, despite the malfunctioning part, was astute enough to provide some nearly-boiling water as they walked in through her doors. The kettle hadn't actually been in the console room last he checked, but they did need tea. He spooned some of the provided Earl Grey into an equally handy teapot and poured over the now boiling water. Then a timer--make sure he of all people didn't forget the tea. Ace dropped her backpack and removed her jacket.

They stood awkwardly around the control room for a few minutes, the Doctor looking at a few settings on the console, before Ace sighed, and then murmured as if she had only now remembered, "Can you get the vines out of my hair? Not sure I can see them well enough to do them properly. I mean," and the timer went off, "I'll go ask Lotti to take them back out if you... are busy, Professor."

"Tea," he said, pushing a mug into her hands, "But yes, of course, and you're also going to unburden yourself inasmuch as possible before a well-deserved rest. Have you seen a couch of any sort in the TARDIS recently?"

"There was one by my room, but it's small."

"Just so long as it'll seat the both of us." He grabbed a cup for himself and followed her, doing some unobtrusive scouting of the situation with her hair and the vines.

"I haven't slept since they got me," Ace admitted, seating herself on the couch slightly askew and wrapping her hands around the tea as if to enjoy the most of its warmth. "I think they gave me some kind of drug that caused it." She was very matter-of-fact but clearly hurt by the next information: "They said they gave me a lot of things. Dissolve your bones and whatnot. Think I should have some kind of health scan, though Lotti and the man with the flowers in his eye sockets both said they didn't do all the things they said they did. Painful injections and psychological torture, I think." 

"I'll see to it, once you drink your tea. Did they feed you?" he asked solicitously. He was slipping into the role of comforter, even though he himself felt the need for comfort.

"A bit, now and then. Bruised me up, too. The torture wasn't so bad, if you ignore all the things they said they were going to do."

He put down his mug and gave a careful experimental pull to a section of the vine woven into her hair. It came free without _too much_ reluctance. "I didn't sleep either. But no one tortured me. I just..." his voice broke a little, "I thought you were dead, Ace. Though you need comfort more than I do." 

"I thought you were gone, or else undergoing the same thing I was, just... elsewhere. Because they said that's how they treat foreigners." Her voice went small, and he was sorely reminded of the fact that she was, as yet, just a human teenager. Quite a tough one, yes, but still somewhat vulnerable. Well, even he could be vulnerable when it came to people arbitrarily seizing his companions. 

His next question may have been an attempt to absolve his guilt. "Did they give you any warning? I don't know why I missed it. And I'm sorry, about you being snatched."

"No. They ganged up on me so fast that I couldn't do much about it. I squirmed. Think I managed to kick one of them in the thigh, but it was... out of nowhere," she sounded a little guilty, and he felt bad at the fact that he had not quite intentionally yanked a strand of hair while trying to get out the last of the first plant's roots. 

Clearly both of them felt guilty, and at this point there wasn't anything to be done about it anyway. "Did you really--were you trying to gas out the place and maybe even blow it up for my sake?"

"Absolutely," he said with a resolve that probably was, actually, a little frightening.

* * *

"I was going to blow it up. I used to--I didn't care whether I lived or died." It was hard to admit this to the Professor, but it seemed necessary, because how else was she going to convey the ordeal of the past two days? "I kind of _wanted_ to die, and I don't think I would have started messing with the nitro-9 if I kind of didn't _care_." 

The next words didn't come readily, and she could still feel his fingers in her hair. They did not seem all that experienced, but they at least were doing the job. "It was like that again. Down there in that cell, when he told me they might put flowers in my eyes, or sew up my mouth. I was gonna blow up the place and die that way. I always thought I should die in an interesting way and well, better that than torture." 

"Or the slow death by being used as a plant incubator?" That felt like he'd read her mind, even though he was a bit sarcastic with his tone. "Oh, Ace." _promise me you won't do that_ her mind filled in, which was familiar, and not all that comfortable. 

"It's not the time, now, to explore that better, I think. Just this present ordeal. You need rest. But please--," he paused, and if he hadn't been gently and steadily pulling on a plant at the back of her head, Ace would have turned to look at him, "tell me if you feel that way again. Tell me."

"I don't know if you can fix it, Doc," she said flippantly, for some reason. Just, it hadn't been showing its head much lately and it wasn't exactly something you could run in and fix like so many adventure stories and like she thought the Professor usually does.

"I don't know if I can fix it either. But--I have a few centuries of tragedies and angst and pain--along with the all happy bits." (the happy bits part he suddenly veers into adding, with wry humor.) "I can be there with you."

There were a few moments of silence then, and it felt like he'd extracted the second vine from her hair. 

"You couldn't, though, not in the cell," she pointed out, and was quickly afraid she was trying to hurt his feelings.

"I know," he allowed slowly. "But rarely, rarely--" his r's always sound sort of ...nice. It's beginning to be homey. "--have I found that there is no friend whatsoever in sight." 

After another moment, and some motion in her hair, he sang a couple lines from a song she didn't recognize, "You've got a friend in me, you've got a friend in me. When the road looks rough ahead, and you're miles and miles from your nice warm bed...just remember," he mumbled a word or two, and Ace decided he probably didn't remember them, "you've got a friend in me." 

She couldn't think what else to say right then and so muttered, "That's a nice song."

"It's from a movie," the Professor reflected, and then made one final pull, several seconds long. "There, all the plants out. I'll try to research them later." 

"Lotti said something about growing them at a hairdressers. Maybe they don't need to be in hair on a person's head."

"I don't think I'm going to try to grow them. Now," she could hear him drinking a bit of tea, "I think you may need another hug." 

"Professor," she said as she turned and leaned into him, wrapping her arms around him too, "I do." 

"Shower now or too tired?" he asked after a minute, but not very much like he was prompting her. 

She sighed, because she was pretty sure trying to get up and go at this point would make both her tired body and the Professor cross. "Later." In fact, instead of getting up, she leaned sideways into the Professor, who put his arm around her shoulders, and closed her eyes. They could just ...rest there, for a few minutes.


End file.
